This blog is about my exposure to the Spanish language and various Latin-American cultures through travel and research; particularly Black Latino (Afro-Latino) cultures.

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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Black Contributions to Mexican Independence—September 16, 1810

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In
2006, Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art revealed the missing chapter in Mexican history with a groundbreaking
exhibition, “The African Presence in Mexico.” As Mexico celebrates her Independence Day, I am never surprised to meet
Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans, not to mention so many of my fellow African-Americans, who are unaware of Mexico’s third
root -- there is the indigenous, the Spanish, and there is the African. This is understandable because after centuries of interracial
marriages (and “relationships”), the sub-Saharan African presence in Mexico took
a much sharper decline than most other Western nations with a history of slavery.

It was the late anthropologist and professor at Mexico’s University of Vera Cruz,
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, who published interesting facts in his book, La
Población Negra de México (the Black Population of Mexico). One of the facts he pointed out was that more
than 500,000 African slaves were brought in through Mexico’s Port of Vera Cruz from
the time of the Cortez invasion until the day of Mexican
independence.

I recently engaged in a
conversation with an immigrant from Mexico’s State of Guerrero, where the
resort city of Acapulco is located. She was so surprised when I told her that
her state is named after her country’s liberator General Vicente Guerrero. I didn't share the fact that this liberator happens to be the son of an African slave mother and a Mestizo peasant
father, and became the Mexico’s second president in 1829. She seemed overwhelmed just with hearing how her state got its name..

A statue of Gaspar Yanga who who freed his Mexican town of runaway slaves from Spanish rule almost 200 years before the rest of Mexico.

Another Mexican couple was equally surprised when I told
them that in their home state of Vera Cruz, almost 200 years before Mexico
officially became independent, an African slave rebel named Gaspar Yanga
joined forces with another rebel slave leader named Francisco de Matosa to
establish Mexico’s first free town, a free Black town independent of Spanish
rule. It was the diligent work of Vicente Guerrero’s grandson, a writer, an
attorney, a former military general, and Mayor of Mexico City, Vicente Rivas
Palacio, who made Yanga a national hero as he published accounts of Yanga’s
revolutionary valor against the Spanish in an anthology in 1870.In the book, No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans
Today by Minority Rights Press, the writer/researcher Jameelah Muhammad
pointed out that the African presence in Mexico is a subject often denied, but
people of African descent have influenced every aspect of Mexican life,
culture, and history.

Blacks played major roles In Mexico’s war of Independence
from Spain believing this will help to end slavery and the caste system. Full
blooded black men in leadership positions in the Mexican revolution included
Juan Bautista, Francisco Gomez, and José María Alegre. According to some historians, it was the Ejército Moreno (the Colored
troops) who launched the independence struggle on behalf of Mexico.

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Bill Smith Jr

billsmih510@gmail.com — Bill is a certified professional résumé writer born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and raised in New York City, the USA near Spanish Harlem where he began teaching himself Spanish at age 10. His late Mexican-American friend, Yolanda Guttierrez, strongly encouraged Bill to learn the culture if he is going to speak the language. Bill took her advice to heart by exploring black cultures in Latin America through research and travel, thus his blog, African American-Latino World.